Night Watch might not be a standard “Halloween” film since it falls more under the category of thriller than straight up horror, however it focuses on warring supernatural types called “Others” – one set of which are vampires, there’s lots of blood, a lot of creepy scenes, and, really, I just think it’s sick. It’s sort of like a Russian version of the Underworld series: there used to be full-scale war between the two groups of Others – the very creatively named Dark and Light – though they eventually reached some sort of a truce to prevent the complete destruction of both groups.Read More

I think I’ll start by trying to explain something that I’ve tried to explain to many people since 2012, when our headlines started featuring the Russian women who go by the name of Pussy Riot. First things first: Pussy Riot is not, and never was a punk band in any real sense. Most of us reading this site are connected to the punk subculture in a real way, so we, unlike the white collared news editors, know that there is some sort of unwritten requirement of some sort of indefinable tribal nature, and not everyone who jangles on an outRead More

FOR THE SAKE OF RUSSIA focuses on Russian film and dissecting popular myths about Russian or Soviet life, characterizations of the Russian Soul as seen through film, and of course the occasional gangster movie. Flight is a film based on a play by Mikhail Bulgakov, you know, the guy that wrote your favorite book Master & Margarita. Bulgakov’s taste for the zany is a little less prevalent here, but his ability to reflect on the Russian Soul is ever present. The Russians have a term for a very specific type of depression – тоска (toska), and that’s whatRead More